Maternal Reactions and the Development of Independence and Achievement Behavior in Young Children1

The achievement motive has been the subject of much psychological research in recent years. The concerted efforts of McClelland and his colleagues, for example, have produced a number of investigations of achievement motivation and its behavioral correlates (2, 5). Almost all these and other studies of achievement, however, have been limited to subjects of high school age or older. With the exception of a very few studies, such as those of Winterbottom (8), Rosen (6), and Kagan et al. (4), little research has been conducted with children; almost none has been directly concerned with the origins and early development of achievement behaviors. In child development research, on the other hand, an extensive body of knowledge has been obtained in respect to the development of children's mental and physical abilities-the tools for achievement behavior-while research on the development of achievement behavior per se has not been undertaken. Individual differences in achievement motivation are discernible in